Family Adventures Beyond Imagination

If you're a parent, you may already be familiar with the cute, bespectacled aardvark featured in an interactive exhibit at Great Explorations! The Children's Museum in St. Petersburg (1925 Fourth St. N., 727-821-8992, www.greatexplorations.org). Arthur™, the 8-year-old PBS cartoon character from "Arthur's™ World,” is today's Barney. He's the reason why, at this summer's exhibit, your kids may want to set the table in the Reads' Family Kitchen whereas you have to nag them to do it at home.

The kitchen play area, complete with a child-size Arthur™ that kids can dress, is one of four modeled after the cartoon, which is based on a book series by Marc Brown. The exhibit, however, is just a small part of what this two-story museum has to offer to beat the summer heat. Kids in grades 1-6 can spend the day working with clay, taking photographs, building robots, learning to read music or engaging in more than a dozen other fun and educational activities in the museum's weeklong summer camps. The Ultimate Field Trip takes kids to a different area museum or cultural attraction each day.

In addition to summer programs, the center has regular exhibits that teach kids life skills in a pretend world scaled to their size, including a tree house, a fire engine, an animal hospital with X-rays, a grocery store with shelves of real canned food, a pipe xylophone, materials to make toy racecars, a carpenter's workshop and much more.

Adults aren't left out. Next door to the museum you'll find Sunken Gardens (727-551-3102, www.stpete.org/sunken), St. Petersburg's oldest tourist attraction. Created from a drained lake, the historic below-street-level botanical garden has one of the most impressive displays of tropical foliage you'll find in Florida. Bougainvillea spills over its high walls, wisteria vines are big as trees and birds of paradise meet the sky. Twisted live oaks and gushing fountains keep the meandering concrete pathways cool even in the heat of summer.

If the garden's Laughing Kookaburras, the world's largest kingfishers, are calling, it's easy to imagine you're in a Tarzan movie. Just remember it's not an interactive exhibit. The vines are off limits.